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December 27, 2012

Review Gadget : Nokia Lumia 610 Review

Lumia, Lumia, Lumia.
Who would have thought, way back at Nokia World 2011, that the name
would come to ring as affectionately as it does today? The first three
releases in the family, the 800, 710 and, most recently, the 900,
all provided such a fluid, well-rounded experience that we found it
easy to overlook certain weaknesses in their spec sheets. Low-res 480 x
800 displays and single-core processors were largely forgotten in the
face of a fresh aesthetic and matching OS that stood out from the
smartphone crowd.
Which brings us to Lumia number four: the 610.
As a budget phone currently going for free on a £15-per-month contract
in the UK, it's been built on Nokia's belief that Windows Phone will run
on almost anything: the merest of Snapdragon S1 processors (clocked at
just 800MHz) coupled with a few crumbs of RAM (256MB). Overall, those
specs make previous Lumias -- with their S2 chips, 512MB and 1.4GHz
clock speeds -- look almost futuristic. The question is, can WP really
come this cheap and survive intact? Read on and you'll find out.

Hardware

The price of the Lumia 610 evidently isn't enough to get Nokia's design wizards
out of bed in the morning, but it'll still buy you a decent-looking
handset. Our white and chrome review sample is perhaps the blandest of
the bunch, while the more colorful variants -- like the magenta one we saw in our hands-on -- have tinted chrome edges and hence make a bolder entrance.
Leaving the colors aside, this is actually quite a derivative design
that has nothing in common with the chic appearance of the 800 or 900.
The shape and size is much like that of the 710: the thin rear cover is
Samsung-like (without calling out any model in particular), the
plasti-chrome edging is BlackBerry Curve-flavored and the front panel
looks kinda like an HTC Trophy
from 2010. All these sources of inspiration have one thing in common:
what they lack in beauty, they make up for with build quality, and the
Lumia 610 follows that pattern to the letter.

All the corners and edges are gently rounded to offset the handset's
12mm (0.5-inch) midriff. There's some flex in the chassis, resulting in
creaking noises if you squeeze it, but it's not enough to do any harm to
the impression that this is a solidly constructed device that will
stand up to daily wear. Overall, we wouldn't be surprised if many people
preferred the rounded feel of the 610 to that of the 710, which looks
duller and feels slightly more blocky in the hand. The only real niggle
we have regarding the 610's build is the large indented earpiece at the
very top, which accumulates fluff and dust constantly and has to be
blown out -- a problem the 710 shares but to a lesser degree.
Slide off the rear cover and you'll see the familiar 1,300mAh battery
and a micro SIM slot, but -- as expected -- no expandable storage. This
leaves you with 6.21GB of usable space. That's the same as the Lumia 710
and double what you get with the ZTE Tania, but if you can't imagine life without at least 16GB, then budget Androids with microSD slots are two a penny.

All the hardware buttons are down the right-hand side of the chrome
edge: you get a volume rocker, then the power / standby button in the
middle, and finally a camera button at the very bottom, which we'll come
to in the camera section below. Along the top edge, you have the 3.5mm
headphone jack, into which you can plug the cheap, black-colored
supplied headset. Beside the jack sits the micro-USB port for charging
and syncing. On the rear cover, you can see holes for the 5-megapixel
camera and small LED flash, plus the speaker grill at the bottom, which
emits tinny sounds that crackle too easily at high volume.
Turning to the all-important front face of the device, we see that we
get capacitive navigation buttons for the primary Windows Phone
functions: Back, Home and Search. This is a departure from the 710,
which uses hardware navigation buttons, and whether that's a good thing
will depend on personal preference. For this author, a fluid UI is
paramount and capacitive buttons win because they feel more like
navigating the touch panel itself -- there are no jarring shifts from a
light touch on the panel to a hard press for navigation. So, notch up
one more small, but significant, win for the 610.

Display

The layout of Windows Phone is all about skinny fonts and bold tiles
surrounded by vast, calming expanses of black or white space. You need a
panel with good contrast to do it justice, and both the Lumia 800 and
710 came well-equipped for the challenge: the 800 has a ClearBlack
AMOLED panel, while the 710 had a ClearBlack TFT. The humble 610,
meanwhile, has a display that isn't especially clear or black.

It's no different from a budget panel circa 2010.

It's no different from a budget panel circa 2010. There are dark
ripples of uneven backlighting along the bottom. The LCD itself looks
like it's been covered in extra-thick glass borrowed from the Popemobile
and the result is too reflective and washed-out. That said, the 480 x
800 resolution is fine for the 3.7-inch screen size, and overall we can
at least say this display gets the job done without any major issues.

Performance, battery life and reception

If there were nasty surprises with the Lumia 610, this is where you'd
expect to find them. When the disco's over and the lights come on, it's
already proved itself to be an acceptable-looking device, but how well
does it move?
Surprisingly, the 800MHz processor delivers a
mostly smooth Windows Phone experience -- even though it is noticeably
slower than the 710 during basic navigation. You'll occasionally find
yourself staring at a blank screen for half a second, but that's a small
sacrifice to make when you consider the price of the handset and how
just useful that next screen will be when it finally arrives. This
experience is borne out in benchmarking, with WP Bench awarding the
Lumia 610 a score of just 54 -- far, far below the 710.

The low specs don't really matter until you reach the Marketplace and
discover that your phone doesn't have enough memory to run every app you
might want. This shouldn't come as a surprise, however, because we've
been reporting on this little controversy for a while and indeed the 610's limitations are readily admitted within the OS and Marketplace screens.
You also have to bear in mind that it's better than the alternative:
downloading apps only to discover that they crash or don't work
properly. Nevertheless, with the 710 selling for perhaps only a smidgen
more than the 610, and coming as it does with a full complement of 512MB
RAM, this poses a serious dilemma. You may not need Skype -- especially
since the 610 has no front-facing camera -- but what else could you be
excluded from in the future? Angry Birds and PES 2012 currently won't run either.

Lumia 610

Lumia 710

Lumia 800

Titan

WP Bench

54

85

86

96

Battery drain

7:15

2:35

2:40

3:00

SunSpider

11,434

6,826

7,200

6,500

We used the 610 without problems on the Three network in the UK. It
handles GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 and WCDMA 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100
bands, with data over EDGE and HSDPA 7.2Mbps. Call quality was flawless
and HSPA data speeds were as fast and stable as with any other non-HSPA+
phone. Sometimes, however, a tardy data connection (not the fault of
the phone) exacerbated the weak processor (definitely the fault of the
phone) to make browsing too slow to be practical. The SunSpider test for
browsing speed gave the 610 a time of 11,434ms -- an appalling score,
although one which exaggerates the actual scale of the problem. The
desktop version of Engadget.com took a while to render whenever we
scrolled or zoomed in, but we were still able to read it -- although
it'd definitely be preferable to set Internet Explorer to look for the
mobile versions of a website wherever possible. Overall, the browsing
experience doesn't destroy the 610's credibility, but it underscores,
yet again, that the 710 delivers a lot more power for similar money.
As you can tell from the table above, battery life was remarkable.
We'll re-test the WP Bench rundown score in case there was a fluke or
error, but we doubt it'll make much difference. With moderate to heavy
usage, there'd rarely be less than 50 percent of battery juice remaining
at the end of the day -- a major benefit from the weak processor.

Camera

Good cameras in phones aren't cheap, and if you take a lot of snaps on
your handset then you're in the wrong place. While the weakness of the
processor is disguised by the OS, it comes right to the fore as soon as
you press the dedicated camera button. Doing so brings up the camera,
but only after a roughly three-second wait. Once there, you can either
tap the screen once to set focus and exposure for that zone and take the
shot (by far the fastest option), or you can press the camera button
halfway to lock focus (but not exposure) and then fully to take the
shot. If the camera button also locked exposure, it'd make a lot more
sense, but frankly that's the least of our worries.

More urgently, images are hard to focus consistently and are slightly
washed out and unrewarding to look at -- just like those from the Lumia
710. They're noisy if ambient light is anything less than abundant, and
overall they're a patch on stills produced by higher-specced Windows
Phones like the Lumia 800 or the Titans. The 610 also lacks
processor-hungry features like a panorama mode. Video is smooth and
autofocus does its job, but the resulting footage is only VGA -- there
are webcams these days that can deliver the same. Once again, the 710
wins hands down, delivering crisp 1280 x 720 video.

Software

Fortunately, as we've mentioned, the processor handles Windows Phone Mango admirably, which means that all the fundamental benefits
of that OS apply here (although bear in mind the RAM caution above).
The UI is easy to understand, with just two home screens: the main one
containing the live tiles that you're free to pin and organize as you
like, and the second containing an alphabetical list of all your apps.
There's also a multi-tasking screen, activated by pressing and holding
the Back button, which allows you to switch relatively quickly between
different apps you've loaded up. Moreover, the WP keyboard is the best
typing experience you'll find on a phone of this size, bar none.
Office and SkyDrive are a combined force for productivity. When you open
Office, you can create, view and edit not only locally-stored
documents, but also documents that are synced with your cloud storage --
either SkyDrive, Office365 or OneNote. Each of these has its own
strengths: SkyDrive is a good repository for all file types; 365 is
mainly an enterprise solution; OneNote is perfect for simple but
sophisticated note sharing across platforms, not least because there are
OneNote apps for Android and iOS.
There are lots of other extras
that you only discover over time. For example, the Lumia 610 comes with
a recent version of Windows Phone Mango that can handle wireless
tethering, allowing you to share a cellular data connection with other
devices via WiFi. Also, as with previous versions, if you hook the phone
up to your dash or audio system over Bluetooth, it will -- if you so
choose -- interrupt your music if you receive an SMS and even read the
SMS out to you. It requires no set up and works well, although
responding using WP's cloud-based speech recognition is more hit and
miss.
We've been banging on about this for a while, but it
deserves to be reiterated: Nokia's apps are not bloatware, but are
valuable additions. Just look at Drive, for example: a fully-fledged
voice-guided navigation system with free offline maps for a large number
of countries. Mix Radio is another boon: free, well-presented and
sensibly categorized music streaming whenever you have a WiFi
connection.

Wrap-up

On a more expensive proposition, the weak camera, capped RAM and slow
browsing performance on this device would be deal-breakers. On the Lumia
610, however, they're things you can learn to live with. The handset
delivers a stunning OS, good phone functionality and a healthy battery
life all packaged within an acceptable design. It never once feels like a
dumbphone trying to play smart -- it's smart to its core and will
deliver all the communication and productivity benefits that you could
want in this category.
The only factor that precludes a
wholehearted recommendation is actually the Nokia Lumia 710. Due to a
quirk of history, that better-specced phone can be had in the UK for a
just a couple of pounds more per month (£17 versus £15, or just £99
Pay-as-you-go), and yet it delivers a superior LCD panel, a much quicker
processor and 720p video recording. The only major sacrifices with the
710 might be its hardware buttons and slightly less bold design, but
these are purely subjective. So, it all comes down to price: if you know
that Windows Phone is what you want (hello, like-minded person); if
none of the aforementioned issues put you off; and if you can find the
610 much cheaper than the 710 -- perhaps as a SIM-free bargain -- then
you can feel safe in taking the plunge.